


Funerary Rites

by aeli_kindara



Series: Supernatural Codas [6]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Episode: s13e05 Advanced Thanatology, Gen, Post-Episode: s13e05 Advanced Thanatology
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-19
Updated: 2017-12-19
Packaged: 2019-02-16 21:23:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,424
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13062414
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aeli_kindara/pseuds/aeli_kindara
Summary: Sometimes, when she needs the space and time to think, Billie visits carrion.Coda to 13.05: Advanced Thanatology.





	Funerary Rites

**Author's Note:**

> Just a weird little fic about becoming a cosmic force and the endless frustration of Winchesters. Warnings for... graphic depictions of decomposition? I guess?

Sometimes, when she needs the space and time to think, Billie visits carrion.

A single deer carcass, on a sunny day, can positively seethe with life. Its very skin flexes and shivers, animated by a microcosm of carrion beetles, blowflies, maggots. Billie can sense the spread of bacteria through its disintegrating flesh, the growth of a million fungal hyphae, the proliferation of nematodes. A human, she knows, would find the odor suffocating. To her, it’s a thousand thousand stories, all layered into one.

By nature, Billie deals in stories — these days more than ever. The halls of her reading room could circle the known universe, grander by far than any of the monuments humans have built in her name. She visits those, too, when the mood strikes: strolls soundless among tourists down wide walkways at the Taj Mahal, visible only as a fleeting reflection in the pool by their feet, or runs fingers down the sleeves of terracotta soldiers in Xi’an. There is an unrobbed chamber deep in a pyramid at Giza where she likes to sit and whet her scythe, watched from the far wall by a dog-headed depiction of her self. There are tombs in the Caucasus Mountains, older than any of them, where the bodies lie embalmed in honey, still rich with the perfume of long-extinct flowers and scattered with the broken wings of bees.

The Zoroastrians, in their day, might have been Billie’s favorite. She once loved to circle with the birds above their dakhma, dusty towers jutting from equally dusty mountains, and wait for an offering to arrive. Sky burial, they called it, and still, sometimes, she’ll hear a vulture calling from a mountaintop in Tibet, or from some wolf-haunted steppe to the north, and she will go.

More often, now, she sits with carrion, or else among the stars.

Never, as a reaper, did she have this kind of freedom. Visiting dying stars is nothing but whimsy — a chance to revel in some of the purest deaths she’s known. Some of them simmer gently into oblivion; others shriek their final defiance to the universe. An exploding star is a gunshot: uncompromising, instantaneous, silent in the airless void. She would race its inferno of photons from one galaxy to the next, if only she had the time.

Billie does not attend the deaths of stars out of obligation. For all she knows, they have their own reapers, their own Death, operating on a plane even she can’t comprehend. Neither is the deer her affair, nor an ancient sequoia living as it dies. Certainly not the expirations of angels and demons, messy cataclysms of grace or of concentrated chaos, eddies of intent dissolving back into the Empty from which they came. Billie finds nothing less interesting than angels and demons: the distasteful results of bestowing consciousness on something too vacant to know what the gift is worth.

(She will allow the nagging possibility of further examination in the case of her own murderer, the angel Castiel.)

No, humans are Billie’s domain, and Winchesters, it seems, her specialty.

She lets her mouth tilt in a rueful smile. Once upon a time, in her old life, Winchesters were simple: a thorn in her side, the enemy of the natural order of things. Misbehaving house plants in need of pruning back — and Billie was ready with the shears.

Things look different now.

The Winchesters are… something else. Not gods, or fates, or cosmic entities; no, they are frustratingly, critically human, and that, she’s coming to understand, is the point. _Humans_ are the point: helplessly naive little creatures crawling oblivious over the hallowed mazes of destiny they’ve inherited, hacking new paths through the hedges and mucking up the grass. Free will, if you must. It’s the subject of Billie’s library: choices, possibilities. Her entire reading room is one long experimental text, and the Winchesters, for better or worse, are the fulcrum on which the story turns.

As it turns out, the story is terrifying.

Billie never used to believe fear could live in a being like her. That was before she became Death; before she grasped the dizzying span and scope of the universes attested in her books.

What scares her is how few of them actually exist.

Every page in that reading room is another possible splintering. She has stories that stretch back to the dawn of mankind; to Cain and Abel, Adam and Eve. Their choices have mattered, ramified. But so have those of anonymous bank managers, centurions, medicine women, peasants. There should be more worlds by now, more possibilities, than even Billie can count. And yet, there are not. Each day, more universes sputter and die. Adjacent ones might reconverge and cancel each other entirely; others exhaust their self-sustaining force in isolation. Some simply vanish without a trace. A few might leave fragments behind, colliding and adhering to other worlds, growing into their very fabric. Occasionally, the shock of a world’s ending reverberates through all its neighbors and weakens the whole foundation. All that, _without_ Winchesters and their half-angel pets tunneling holes between them.

And Billie’s not sure what she’s supposed to do about it.

The work of a reaper was an easy creed to follow. There’s a balance to things — life, death, choice, fate — and reapers hold the line. Free will, after all, cannot exist without Death; choice cannot exist without consequence. Humans have their set time on earth, and they use it wildly; then it comes due, and they go. She believes this beyond question. What she suspects, more and more — what she fears — is that the same is true of the universes.

Billie doesn’t want to care.

It seems the antithesis of all she is, all she does. Worlds are expiring? Good; let them do it. Rejoice. In Death is the beauty of all things. And yet — and yet —

Next spring, in this place, the deer will be no more. Even its bones will be scattered, carried off by scavengers. The generations of life forms that thrived in its decaying corpse will vanish like so many doomed civilizations. But where it was, new flowers will bloom; mushrooms will grow that have never been seen here before, and will not be again. To Billie, that is rhapsody. She doesn’t want to lose this flawed little world, with all its turnings on turnings. She doesn’t want to lose her vultures and her honeyed tombs. She doesn’t even want to lose its people, for all she revels in the ends of their wayward lives.

Dean Winchester, today, was ready to die.

And maybe therein lies the lesson. Because he feared it, too — has always feared her, even when she was another self. Maybe he knows, as humans seem to do, that seeking Death and fearing Death are not in opposition; maybe he understands that destruction is the necessary mirror to creation, that every ending says, _begin again_. Or maybe he knows no such thing. Maybe he’s just a spinning knot of pain, and maybe that pain is the knowing.

Billie met a poet, once, in Rome, who whispered in her ear as she took him by the hand: _nil mortalibus ardui est. Nothing is hard for those destined to die_ — the greatest untruth Billie ever heard. Everything is hard for humans; the depths of grief they invest in everyday trivialities is more than testament to that. And yet, and yet, and yet.

Billie shakes her head. She presses her scythe to her lips, and closes her eyes. Then she opens them and laughs.

_But I say,_ she thinks, _keep living._ The hardest task of all.

Maybe that is her calling. To seek not endings, but beginnings; to turn the soil of the multiverse, a good gardener, a planter of forests she may not ever see. Maybe that particular Winchester brand of disruption is exactly what this stagnant seedbed needs. Maybe her role is to stand back, let them get to it, and collect the spoils as she must.

Maybe, she thinks ruefully, she must now live as humans do: to place blind faith in a course, without knowing where it leads. Her books do not tell of holes between worlds. They do not tell of Lucifer’s son.

Somewhere else, the earth shakes. A dozen souls cry out; a dozen more. Plaster cracks and tumbles, concrete splits, a wall groans and falls. A daughter crawls toward her mother on dusty knees. Billie is needed. Billie is known.

In a whirl of dark robes and the dull gleam of her scythe, she goes.

**Author's Note:**

> The Latin is from Horace's Carmina 1.3; translation my own. Let me know if you want the whole thing.


End file.
